Effect of caffeine concentration and incubation time on the cell concentration of wild-type Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Lucy Hu, Taekkeun T. Jeong, Josephina K. Kim, Grace Liu

Abstract

Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a eukaryotic organism that has been studied intensively. Its genome has been completely sequenced, and many of its pathways and genes have homologues to those in humans. We conducted an experiment to determine the effect of caffeine concentration and incubation time on the cell concentration of wild-type S. cerevisiae. We had treatments of 0mM, 10mM, 20mM, and 30mM of caffeine. We counted the number of cells every two hours, from t = 0 to t = 8 hours, using haemocytometers. After collecting the data, we used a two-way ANOVA and found significant differences in cell concentration at varying caffeine concentrations and time intervals. Moreover, the interaction between caffeine and incubation time had a significant effect on cell concentration. Although cell concentration increased as time passed, caffeine had an overall inhibitory effect on the growth of S. cerevisiae.